Perils of the Recession Generation

In October 1932, The New York Times ran a special section on the crisis of America’s Depression-era youth. It was headlined, “A Tragic Aftermath of the Days of Prosperity: The Army of Homeless Boys Now Roaming the Country.”

The following year, the historian Steven Mintz notes in “Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood,” the film “Wild Boys of the Road” grimly dramatized the plight of the quarter of a million kids who by the early 1930s were “bumming” around the country.

“Homeless children riding the rails became a defining symbol of youth in crisis,” Mintz writes. These children’s lives, he says, were full of violence, hunger, crime, fear and — for girls — sexual assault and prostitution: “Children were the Depression’s most vulnerable victims, both economically and psychologically.”

I was reminded of Mintz’s account this week when I read The Times’ devastating two-part series on the runaway boys and girls (Part I | Part II) who are becoming increasingly numerous in our own Great Recession as their family lives fray under the pressure of hard times. I contacted Mintz and, it turned out, he was thinking along the same lines.

“The parallel struck me as remarkable — and deeply disturbing,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “Economic hardship has a very destructive impact on parenting. Parents become depressed, withdrawn and quick to anger. Physical punishment often increases. Then, and now, the young are the unheralded victims of economic hard times.”
There are, of course, some very major differences between the current recession (or jobless recovery), and the suffering of children in the Great Depression. There is, for starters, a vast difference of scale; in 1932, at the peak of the Depression, 28 percent of the nation’s households did not have a single employed wage earner.

Thanks to the movement of women into the workplace, families today are at least partially buffered against the devastation of (mostly male) job losses. The psychological ramifications of fathers being out of work appear to be nowhere near as grave as they were in the 1930s. “In the Great Depression, large numbers of men did experience a sort of existential crisis: who am I, if I’m not a breadwinner; am I still a man? They had a very hard time adjusting to domesticity,” says Michael Kimmel, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, who specializes in the study of men and masculinity. “I get a lot of questions now asking if we’re seeing signs of increases in domestic violence or alcoholism among men, and the answer is no. This is not your father’s Depression. The men I’m talking to aren’t seeing this as an existential crisis.”

Still, the financial stresses on families now are real and undeniable, even among households far less afflicted than those fled by the runaways chronicled by The Times. With unemployment reaching up toward 10 percent, fully 80 percent of Americans have reported feeling stressed about the economic downturn. Women report the greatest levels of economy-related unhappiness of all, with increased stress-related symptoms like irritability, anger and fatigue. All of this radiates down to kids. “You don’t have to be poor to feel deep economic distress in this recession,” Mintz told me. “And kids are very vulnerable to what parents feel.”

The youth crisis of the 1930s terrified observers and led to a profound shift in American politics. “The Depression toppled the notion that children’s welfare could be left to individual families, private charities, and local and state governments,” Mintz writes. “It created a consensus that the federal government had a responsibility to promote children’s well-being.” Anxious about the emergence of a “lost generation” that could fall into the grip of fascism, the Roosevelt administration started the country’s first free-lunch programs, opened hundreds of free nursery schools, created the first federally-financed work-study programs for teenagers, funneled money to poor states to maintain teachers’ salaries, and created jobs for teenagers. Schools were built. Aid to Dependent Children came into being.

But if needy children were iconic — and change-inspiring — back then, they now appear to be all but forgotten.

The stimulus package of last spring contained a good deal of additional federal financing for child-care and Head Start programs. But that assistance was a one-shot deal. Ten states have cut back on their financing for pre-kindergarten education; at least nine have growing wait lists for child-care subsidies. Ohio and California have eliminated certain preschool programs altogether; other states are making it harder for families to qualify for state assistance.

Candidate Obama promised to double federal money for afterschool programs — instead that funding has remained flat, even as need has increased. According to a recent national survey carried out by the Afterschool Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group, 26 percent of school-age children are left alone after school each day — an increase of 800,000 kids since 2004. And as many as 100,000 teachers have been laid off this year.

The issue of paid sick days — a hot one in the last election year — appears to be off the national agenda entirely, a bizarre omission in this flu season. Missing, too, is action on all the earlier talk about equal pay, a particularly relevant issue at a time when families are more and more dependent on women’s salaries.

Overall, the Depression-era consensus regarding care for children and families appears to be shattered, or at best, deeply fragmented.

“We seem to care little about what it means to a child to lose a home or have stressed-out parents,” Mintz says. “The difference between then and now is striking.”

Is it an overstatement to say that we’re at risk of losing a generation of children if we don’t step up to the plate to provide additional support for families under duress? We are, at the very least, at risk of helping erode children’s most basic sense of security and safety, as well as their hopes for the future. Families are keenly under pressure. We ignore them at our collective peril.

you ask: “Is it an overstatement to say that we’re at risk of losing a generation of children if we don’t step up to the plate to provide additional support for families under duress?”

Who are we kidding? We’ve already lost them. The recent gang rape at the HS Dance; the teen set on fire while his tormentors laughed; Chicago’s gang violence etc.

And lest we relegate these heinous acts to our poorer populations, the excess before the recession and the bankruptcy of values in the middle and upper classes only takes the violence from the street to the boardroom, where the monstrous off-spring of the “Me Generation” will be tomorrow’s CEOs and Hedge Fund managers.

It was rampant narcissism and hubris that brought the economy to its knees and the over-indulged, morally rudderless children of these perpetrators are just as lost as the California teens idly watching that 15 year old girl
get raped.

Instead of after-school programs, we need a longer school day with a more varied schedule that includes physical activity every day. The U.S. also needs a longer school year and more flexible absence rules so families can vacation together. Communities need to stop worrying about what year round school will do to sports schedules and just find a solution or cut sports loose from the schools.

Curriculums at school shouldn’t just focus on academic subjects. Students should learn skills that allow them to become somewhat self-sufficient — gardening, shop, cooking, knitting, child-care or parenting skills, auto maintenance, and sewing, for instance. Physical education should include various kinds of dancing so students have a life-long social skill. Music, art and foreign languages should be taught to young students, in particular.

Learning skills like sewing and gardening teaches problem-solving skills and the need to work in sequence, which will be useful when students begin working.

We’ve reduced the independence children have and limited the jobs they can take. We shouldn’t be infantilizing children further, and a more varied education will help them mature. We also need to stop kidding ourselves about the skills children are learning at home. Many children don’t learn to cook from scratch, sew or change the car’s oil from their parents because the parents don’t know how to do those things.

Changing public education will provide additional support to families if families don’t have to pay as much for after-school care. Providing children with more life skills will strengthen them in many different ways for the future, and that will also benefit their families.

Has Ms. Warner seen the documentary about young people riding the rails during the Depression? Remove the golden glow of the thirties for a clearer view of shattered families, no effective support programs, shuttered banks, lost savings…unfortunately, if there’s no help now, as with Bush and Katrina, then this time it’s Obama’s fault.

But the moneyed interests, supported by Republicans, continue to profit as the ills you describe increase, and they couldn’t care less.
There have been many articles that starkly illustrate the growing disparity between what the wealthy accrue and what’s left over for everyone else, with the middle class gradually being destroyed as a consequence.
The legalized bribery being doled out to lawmakers is resulting in corruption not seen since the Gilded Age, with the stakes today being immeasurably greater. That Obama and the Democrats are not stepping up to the plate as was promised during his candidacy constitutes nothing but bad news.
History demonstrates absolutely that when the institutions of any nation become corrupted on this level of magnitude, such a nation will eventually collapse under the weight of its own rot. Anyone who says that this can’t happen here is being victimized by delusional thinking.

Judith — the Ledbetter Act was the first piece of legislation this President signed. It was named for Lily Ledbetter, whose otherwise successful pay-discrimination case against Goodyear was undermined by the Supreme Court’s narrow interpretation of the statute of limitations.

Congress passed a law amending the statute, and Obama — who had campaigned with Ledbetter — eagerly signed it.

Your line about the missing action on equal pay is a gross inaccuracy and deeply offensive. (Even more offensive is your ongoing assumption that women only count if they’re mommies.)

Right now America is in denial. Americans know there are problems but are unwilling to even think about long term employment that may last for 5 years.

Even the government is in denial.

Today the government announced the end of the recession based growth of the GNP upon onetime effect of the federal government dumping billions of dollars into the economy.

Hopefully when all the delusions of “green shoots” and claims of the end of the recession based on government spending are seen as meaningless there will be concern for the dealing with the problems of long term unemployment and an decaying economy.

Pitiful, isn’t it. The conservative focus on wealth and selfishness has sacrificed the children to stacked competition, where there are always far more losers than winners, especially in the less wealthy.

The cold callous attitudes of the conservative mindset have infected so many people, that we are going to have a bunch of children that think that the world is so cruel that the only option is to be just as cruel.

We need more compassion, more kindness, and more understanding, that’s for sure! Otherwise, we will have a huge group of criminal sociopaths on our hands.

Thank you for this article. Just yesterday I heard the news that our government is declaring our economy on the mend! What economy are they talking about? Their own? It seems that every day I hear of another person unemployed. I myself was unemployed last year and am in an unstable job this year. We have children homeless, parents disintegrating—yet we had reverse Robin Hood theft from the middle class to the rich and powerful, to the tune of over $700 billion. Remember how this was supposed to ‘trickle down’ and encourage our banks to loan more money? The only thing it seems to be trickling down into is the wallets of a handful of cronies and ultra rich. I am disgusted by the whole direction our President is taking us. Every so often he wags his finger at the bankers and says what bad greedy boys they are to accept more bonuses; then he disappears. Meanwhile, our children are suffering. It’s appalling.

Yeah, I’d especially like to see paid sick days come back. I work with way too many people who seem to have to decide whether or not to come in when they’re sick, because they have to pay bills.

I wonder what kind of childhood the kid raised in a four day-a-week school system is having. My high school alma mater was, in recent memory, a national school of excellence, and now it’s doing this, along with many other districts I know of around where I grew up. Even if schools pitch things like high-schoolers taking care of younger kids (perhaps a dubious proposition anyway, in some cases), this will tie at least some women–and some men–to odd part-time job schedules, forgoing wage hours during the economic downturn. Absent that, the social cost to kids is probably pretty high as well–this is, inevitably, more unsupervised time for America’s youth, and perhaps an existential crisis in its own right.

I’m sorry, but I disagree greatly that more was done for children in 1932. I can certainly remember in 1950’s-1060’s, and my Parent’s not being able to afford insurance for me, and my Brother. There was no free healthcare for children period. Today we take better care of the Children even if the Parents don’t. I’m 60 years old, and I never in my entire life seen care given back then to children like it is in today’s society. Where do you get your facts? Try talking to folks my age, and older, and I bet they can tell you the true facts.

I can remember going to school, and we never got free lunches. Got pretty hungery back then, but adults didn’t care, and that includes the Teachers.

Why are people comparing the Great Depression with this recession? Why?

Where are the bread lines? where are the food-murders? where are the wild-eyed wanderers?

Uh, surfing the web on a broadband connection? using their cellphones to text their buddies? eating more calories in a day than many Chinese do in 4 days?

This country is so rich and so soft it’s amazing that we have not been plundered already. I thank God for the few, proud, testosterone-fueled young men that still exist to defend our freedom, ease and luxury.

People need to stop whining and realize that they live in wealth and ease incomprehensible to even the rich of former generations.

A timely comment. Obama is showing himself to be no FDR. Giving aid to the those without income and creating jobs on the order of the CCC and the WPA are essential actions the federal government should have taken in the first week following the inauguration. Rescuing the banks was necessary, no doubt, but far from a sufficient remedy for the nation’s ills!

What I’m reading reinforces my belief that no matter what the federal government does as it concerns increased spending via the stimulus package, the individual states have undercut those efforts with spending cuts. Those 100,000 teachers that have been lost to job cuts, those are middle class jobs. The Head Start cuts, those are jobs too.
Another thing which has been made clear to anyone that didn’t understand previously: having and raising children is expensive.

You have mentioned “equal pay” in several posts – could you write a column on this subject? What legislation are you proposing? Now that you have stirred the pot it is incumbent upon you to provide details and recommended actions.

Our youngest began taking off early in his senior year in high school. It was a difficult time, but he was obviously ‘ready to go,’ so we set him up in an apartment nearby and outfitted it sparsely with what he needed. He abandoned everything to follow the Rainbow Family from place to place for a couple of years, where he reportedly (his report) made himself useful, if not indispensable. Then he straightened up and made a career in modeling, but not before getting crosswise of an aggressive young officer in the ‘City of Love’ and getting to experience small-town policing, including beatings and summary justice; eventually he and his friend were found not guilty of assault on a police officer, however, though it cost a pretty penny to prove that.

He and I nearly came to blows a couple of times before he left; young people coming of age know everything, of course, and don’t realize that their parents were young once and sometimes are able to caution them about actions and activities (hitching to Delaware to buy ‘shrooms’ for sale on campus isn’t a good idea, for example).

All of this without us being in difficult financial straits, but I’m sure that it would have all been exacerbated in that case and he’d now be in jail on false charges. One must count whatever blessings one has.

The government is pretending the recession is over, leaning on the GDP going positive 3.5% this past quarter after falling for four consecutive quarters and proof.

What troubles me is the possibility that the worse is still to come. Jobs are not coming back. No matter how hard you juggle the numbers, if people can’t get a good job, there will be no recovery for most of us. In the rust belt city where I grew up, 80% of the kids who take the ISTEP tests at one public high school fail. Only 40% of the kids who start graduate.

College is unaffordable. My college educated daughter will be making student loan payments larger than their mortgages for decades. One is unemployed and the other makes less than my son, who dropped out of high school and now cooks in a local burger joint. He’s the top earner in the family at the moment at around $9 an hour, no benefits.

Nobody can take care of children appropriately without decent pay and health care. The problems in this country go much deeper than funding Head Start and hiring more teachers.

The stimulus package included not only head start money, but some expansions of tax benefits targeted to families with children. Those expansions are lifting hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty. Don’t forget them!

“Is it an overstatement to say that we’re at risk of losing a generation of children if we don’t step up to the plate to provide additional support for families under duress?”

So then… is it the government’s responsibility to “provide additional support for families under duress”? If so, how? There are only so many programs that can be funded (i.e., after-school enrichment, etc.)

Shouldn’t families under duress instead learn skills that will keep them together as a family and remain useful for their entire lives? Someone mentioned teaching cooking from scratch in public schools. I’m 23 and learned how to cook, sew, and build basic things with wood in grades 6 through 8, courtesy of Home Economics (which everyone was required to take.) I attended a very poor school, and I know these skills served me well. Our kids don’t need to go on fancy field trips to other states or foreign countries (as some in my middle/high school did) — it would be far better to, instead, perform community service by volunteering in one’s own community.

What seems clear is that the “support” can’t come from federal programs in order to have lasting effects. Rather, it should come from communities and community organizations: public libraries, food banks, churches. But people aren’t engaged in community life as they once were; social scientists have noted the decline of involvement in communities and social organizations (see “Bowling Alone” for a good look at this development.)

“We” need to create a “we” before such support can exist and be fruitful.

You have got to be kidding! Comparing our generation of teenagers with the depression’s era of teenagers is silly. Our teenagers today are wimps by comparison. My father and his brothers and sisters had to quit school at 12 to work at any job they could find. At 14, they were digging ditches, cleaning out stables, working in slaughter houses, etc. Sometimes from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM. And they were the lucky ones, with a roof still over their heads and food in their mouths. Today’s teenagers have a fit when their ipod isn’t working properly, can’t afford to go to the movies or are told to throw out the trash.